Lamont Weekly Report, January 23, 2009

Well - this is one of those weeks that started off very well - Obama's inauguration on Tuesday. And ended very badly (at least for me) because I had to squeeze in an emergency root canal on a very painful tooth - in between an interesting new donor visit on Thursday morning, a CU Council of Deans meeting on Thursday afternoon (at which was
announced the endowment payout rules for FY09/10 - sorry not public info til next week), and most importantly by far, on Friday afternoon (after the exciting root canal experience) the meeting of the CU Senate's Faculty Affairs Committee at which the vote was taken on the Lamont research professor initiative (I do not have the results yet but I believe them to be extremely favorable). This latter meeting caused me to miss the Faculty meeting this afternoon - which I really did not want to do. Anyway, the other thing about root canals is the amount of money one has to pay in order to lie on one's back for two and a quarter hours with noisy mechanical devices and someone elses hands in your mouth. So as I am sure you can tell right now, I am not in the right mood for writing cheery and literally compelling prose.
So I will just wish you a good weekend.

There is a nice piece - albeit short - on Joe Worzel in the latest Science. Joe was Doc Ewings 'right hand' as Doc founded Lamont in the early fifties. The seminar room in Lamont Hall is named after him.

See: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/323/5913/445e.pdf

And many congratulations to Ruth deFries for being elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.